


the vulture

by dalliancetreads



Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Character Death, F/F, a good ol' fashioned volturi fic, just like mamma made, naughty words, timeline hijinks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-10
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2019-10-07 17:20:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17370200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dalliancetreads/pseuds/dalliancetreads
Summary: My thanks to Kyilliki, who prompted this fic.What if Aro murders Marcus instead of his sister? This fic seeks to answer that question.





	1. Malicious Compliance

_CHORUS: Blind is the fire of love fanned by rage -_

_It does not care to be ruled, it suffers no reins, it fears no death._

—Seneca the Younger, _Medea_  

* * *

 

They stand together at the lip of the dark lake, looking around for casting stones. 

 

"Aro's noticed how you're behaving around our new guard," Sulpicia says. 

 

This is a new thing, this being-a-mouthpiece for Aro as he slunk through back doors at the mere shadow of his sister. Didyme selects a flat stone with a varicose vein of obsidian. 

 

"He'd tell me that himself if he wasn't such a coward," she replies. 

 

"Charmion is sweet and docile," Sulpicia recites from her husband's script. "She was Cleopatra's handmaiden, you know, quite an accomplishment for a young Greek slave. You might get on if you stopped scaring her half to death." 

 

"I don't care. She's so insulting I could  _scream_ ," Didyme says, launching her stone at the lake to emphasize her point. It sinks soundlessly. "I'll strangle her if she stays here any longer. Have you seen her insufferable little smirk? It's the cuntiest thing in the world. How  _dare_ she replace _Marcus_ -" 

 

"Don't be a child." Sulpicia looks at her stonily, with the chip of obsidian in her voice. "It's your own gift forcing her to smile, for fuck's sake." 

 

"Oh," Didyme says, laughing bitterly. She picks up another stone and takes a few seconds to steady her hand. It bounces one, two, three times before it is swallowed by the water. 

 

"Aro's telling you to apologize to her," Sulpicia says. An overcast sort-of tenderness comes across the hard lines of her face. "I'm asking you to be kind about it." 

 

[-] 

 

As a newborn vampire, Charmion expected rage, violence, inescapable bloodlust. But she feels like the new sun of an alien planet dances across her skin, like she has been skinned and reshod in gold, like a hundred halos shoot out the top of her head. She sits on Aro's desk, swinging her legs. She's wearing emerald slippers with crepe hyacinths stuck to the toes. They remind her of a more innocent time, when they'd dress her up like a Cherub for parties. Dove's wings were fastened to her back with a mechanism that allowed them to flap; the freshly-plucked feathers still wept gore. Caesar pinched her cheek and called her a little cutie. 

 

She was drinking blood long before she became a vampire. 

 

"It seems to me that your problems are more familial than imperial," she said, kicking her legs with inexpressible joy. 

 

"My sister," Aro said. He nurses papers in his lap; he looks wounded. 

 

"She snarled at me in the garden this afternoon. I later gathered it was an apology for her rudeness, but, as I say, she had this manic gleam in her eyes. She looked like she'd bite my face off." Charmion smiles beneficently. She reaches into a pocket to stroke the tip of one of Cleo's hairpins. A tiny jade scarab dances on its head, but she feels the sharp end. It scratches shallowly against her thumb.  _Make him love me,_ Cleo had said.  _I know you have that power, kitten._ A note lay in Cleo's lap; Mark Antony had married Octavia, and the girl was already pregnant. Cleo's eyes were like two holes cut out of the universe.  

 

"I'm sorry," he sighs. "She's a lot to deal with, but she'd be a lot more to deal with in my enemies' hands." 

 

"We can't help who we're related to," says Charmion, who has never known a sibling or parent, who wears sweetness like a mechanism on her back. 

 

The gutting candle throws shadowy wrinkles across Aro's forehead. He looks so small and tired and so much like a mole buried deep in its burrow. 

 

"Perhaps it's something I can help with," she suggests. 

 

Aro heaves another sigh. "Perhaps," he says. 

 

 

 


	2. Stone Tapes

Didyme climbs the winding staircase. The belfry was Marcus' favourite hiding-spot; in summer it was like the yolk of an egg; pressing your face against the room's notch-hole you can see down the valley to the winding smoke-trails of a neighbouring town, and the sea beyond is a dizzying question mark. He would stretch both arms out and brush both sides of the room - 

 

She freezes. She hears a high whine, cut off abruptly. Someone is in the room. She stealths the remaining stairs and peeks around the stone column forming the stair's central structure. 

 

Of course. Her hands curl into fists. Of course, it's  _Charmion_. Alone. Didyme tastes venom. Fortune has provided a place to kill her. It would be poetic, even, to murder the impostor in one of Marcus' sanctuaries, a sacrilege that Didyme is willing to wear. 

 

Charmion hasn't noticed Didyme standing there. Her skin scintillates where the pinhole sunshine strikes it. She's hunched over a table with three Roman busts; small hands clam-shelling its cheeks. She's so close to it, they're brushing cheeks. Kissing, almost. Her eyes are wide and dark. She's whispering to it, words too low for Didyme to decipher, but the intonation is impassioned. Didyme recognises two of the busts as Octavian and Lepidus; that leaves the final member of their triumvirate, Antony. 

 

Charmion traces an oh-so-light finger down Antony's nose. A flicker in her eyes. 

 

Didyme hurries down to the mouth of the stairs. She stares at the terracotta brickwork, now seeming to warp into impossible shapes. Why couldn't she just kill Charmion? Why had she given the girl a thought at all? Could it be that she loved Mark Antony?

Could it be she was locked in the self-same grief as Didyme? That girl Didyme sneered at and snapped her olive branches and snubbed - 

 

No. She can't empathise with Aro's minion. Neither can she work herself into a murderous rage. She is at a loss. 

 

The minutes stretch on as she sits there. Finally, something propels her to get up and ascend the stairs, shuffling her feet and treading heavily. 

 

Charmion's moved away from the bust. She's standing by the notch-hole, the green light playing across her face. If she's scared of Didyme, she doesn't show it. She has a face that looks like someone took a rolling pin to a china doll; pretty, but eyes too-wide apart, nose flat, lips stretched like a pike. The room looks decades-abandoned - the rug is rotting, there are buckets of yellowing parchment. 

 

"I didn't know you were up here," Didyme says thickly. She flexes her fingers. "I've been informed that my apology to you was insufficient. Forgive me if there wasn't enough groveling." 

 

"Oh," Charmion says. Her eyebrows disappear into her hairline. "Um, I didn't know you'd be, uh, chastised for that. I just made a throwaway comment to your brother, nothing more." 

 

"Nothing's 'throwaway' to my brother. Except for his friends," Didyme says. She laughs, once. 

 

"Well, I'm perfectly happy to ignore you and get on with my own business, if you would extend me the same courtesy." One of her rosy hands reaches into a pocket. Charmion looks rueful; she doesn't meet Didyme's eyes. Her caramel-coloured hair is stiff with egg whites and woven with tiny pearls. 

 

"I'm afraid the castle is too small for that," Didyme says. "I need to know where we stand." 

 

"Okay," Charmion breathes. She looks for all the world like she's been conjured in a dream, like the light in the room was enough to break her apart, not like a puppet with a formidable gift. "Answer me this, then - why don't you just leave Volaterrae?" 

 

She inhales sharply. "We have many enemies." 

 

"No - I don't want to hear your brother's reasoning," Charmion says. "You're immortal, you're strong and fast, you can swim as far as you'd like, and this place has nothing for you but your husband's death and your brother's shadow. And yet, you've stayed. Why have you stayed?" 

 

"The memories of my husband," Didyme says, sounding false even to herself. 

 

"Are you kept here against your will?" 

 

"No..." 

 

"Wouldn't you prefer to make new memories, in new towns, with new men?" Charmion's voice hits her, again and again. 

 

"No," Didyme says. "It's just that - Marcus was the only man I've ever loved - after Aro, of course. I had many suitors when I was a human and I turned them all down. Marcus - I liked that he carried my brother's approval; that he'd been his companion for some years; that my brother thought he was worthy of - of something. My brother is a remarkable creature, Charmion." 

 

As she says this, she pictures a shadow-cloaked figure ripping open Aro's ribcage and shoving a lit torch into the empty space where his heart would be. She waits for him to slip up, she watches like a carrion bird. Circling, always circling.... 

 

Charmion turns away. 

 

"Did he... Did he ask you to bind me to him?" 

 

Charmion's glasslike hand wraps around her throat. "No," she says finally. But the implication is there. If asked, she would do it without hesitation. 

 

Once, Didyme would too. 

 

[-] 

 

Charmion wakes screaming. Her legs are trapped in vices, her legs have been bitten by vipers, her legs have iron pokers shoved through the bone. Her screams wake the other slaves sleeping by the hearth; they stuff bedclothes in her mouth and hold her while she's fitting and she can't breathe and the suffocation and pain and fear makes her wet herself. 

On the second or third week of this, she is carried through the palace. Each thudding step is torture by fire. The night air smells like jasmine and citronella. She's in an area of the palace she's normally not allowed to go. 

They take her to a woman wearing long white bedclothes. Her black hair hangs down to her waist. Her lip and eye are dark but she seems to be illuminated, to be wreathed in gold and soaked in honey. She presses Charmion's belly to her knees and holds out a long, thin implement, like the proboscis of an insect. It's an ordinary hatpin. 

The lady slides her hairpin into the painful vortex of muscle, deep into the fern-tight tissue. Charmion feels a sudden twang as the muscle springs straight. The pain vanishes. The hairpin has drawn a single ruby-drop of blood; Cleopatra passes a hand over it. She finishes the other leg and holds Charmion in her honey-coloured arms until the girl cannot keep her eyes open. Even in her dreams, she feels her there, circling, circling... 

 

Charmion slides a finger down the bridge of Mark Antony's nose; this is where she'd slice him open, if marble could be flesh, if her finger a scalpel. The lidless whites of his eyes press into her.  _"I hate you,"_ she whispers.  _"You've ruined everything. You've taken_ everything _from me..."_

 

_Was it not Charmion's hand that held the poison to her mistress' lips?_

 

She hears a tread on the stairs - she pushes herself away from that vile bust, as far as she can get. She'd thought this room abandoned. 

 

It's Aro's misanthrope sister. She's longer and narrower than him, as though she was drawn by horses. She's sweet-faced, though her hair is tightly braided and stitched to her skull. Some of it has worked free and sticks up like straw. She's a shook up jar of wasps; she twitches like a marionette with cut strings. 

 

She comes close enough that Charmion feels sunflowers and buttercups bloom in her throat; she cuts them back mercilessly. 

 

"I was informed that my apology was not sufficient. Not enough groveling," she spits. Her posture is cringing. She's pitiable, but unpredictable. 

 

Didyme falters over words that sound like a peace treaty. There's a little spot of strawberry on her lower lip, like a drop of sugar. Charmion wants to wipe it away. She's fixated on it. 

 

"Why don't you leave Volaterrae?" Charmion asks. She'd seen Didyme skulking around, isolating herself like a leper, glaring at anyone near enough to feel her gift. Rumors flew around her about Marcus' death; it was a century or more ago. 

 

"It's my brother," she replies. "He's always told me what to do; he even picked my suitors. I'd be lost without him. He's a remarkable creature, Charmion." 

 

There is an ugly yearning in her voice. Charmion looks away, at the thin slit in the wall that counts as a window around here, the horizontal green stripe like a door just slightly ajar. 

 

"Did he... did he ask you to bind me to him?" 

 

Something incestuous winds through those words; it makes Charmion's skin crawl. Didyme is impossibly innocent and foolish, so easily twisted, so completely without guile. It's a wonder she hasn't been eaten alive. 

 

"No," she says hesitantly. It's not a lie - but just barely. 

 

She waits until she's sure Didyme's gone. She takes Mark's bust off the table and lies it on the floor, where she carefully stoves his face in with the heel of her shoe. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to the folks that left kudos on the last chapter. It's a big motivator!!


	3. Wild Honey

Sulpicia's fingers skeeter in Didyme's lap like the legs of a beetle on its back. A taut, thickened tendon in Sulpicia's palm permanently crooks her index finger towards her wrist, and in the chill months it ached and she would call for Didyme to massage it with oil, stretch it, open up the hot, thin space between the index finger and flesh of her palm.

Didyme brings Sulpicia's hand to her mouth and presses the wet skin of her teeth against the index finger, then closes her lips over it. She lowers it back into her lap. Her kiss did not have any effect. 

 

Sulpicia's other hand grips Athenodora's letter, written in a cypher that leaps across the page like leopards. It was an intellectual exercise, Sulpicia explained, the first time she received a letter, as she folded the letter into her stola, and it would stay there, flush against her skin, and she wouldn't meet Didyme's eyes, because the letter would burn through them and Didyme would finally read it, then. 

 

"Ouch!" Sulpicia jerks her hand from Didyme's. "You pinched me!" 

 

"Did I? Give it back, I'll kiss it better." A poorly disguised note of jealousy slides through her voice, like a snake in the grass. The hand waves hypnotically; she snatches at it. 

 

"No," Sulpicia says, swatting her away. She stands and folds her letter seven times, sliding it into an invisible little slot in her stola. "Stop this - whatever it is you're doing. Which is what, exactly?" 

 

"I don't need to explain myself all the time!" Didyme exclaims. 

 

Sulpicia gives her a considerate pause. "Okay, good. Leave me alone." 

 

She leaves and seems to take all the air with her because Didyme feels strangely breathless. She moves across the room and presses her nose, mouth and chin against the notch-hole, and takes a large, wretched gulp of air, taking with it the smell of baked terracotta, the manure of animals in the fields, grapes spoiling on the vine, and the earthy, sweet-smelling walled garden. 

 

In the garden, a figure stands with a hand against her brow and freshly-picked flowers in the other, ruby-red eyes trained on the window, large and veiled. 

 

"Hello," Charmion says. "I'm - I'm sorry. My new senses are merciless." As Didyme pushes her head through the notch-hole, crumbs of terracotta brick rain down around Charmion, dropping on her white dress and marking it with little fingers of red, like the words of the cypher. "Er, if it's any consolation, it's obvious to me that you're a Gemini and she's a Virgo, and that's a recipe for disaster." 

 

"What?" Didyme says. 

 

Charmion shakes her head. "Come down here." 

 

Didyme hesitates. Could she - jump? The notch-hole was too small to fit her body, but she had the sudden urge, that, if she jumped, she might leave it behind like a discarded snakeskin. 

 

But Charmion would not catch her. Her wide mouth stretched wider, flatter, and she stepped back and crushed a red poppy. 

 

"Don't stand there!" Didyme exclaims. She withdraws from the window and races out of her sitting-room and takes the stairs three at a time, through the low opening to the garden in one big, breathless and electrified hot-pink run, a dash that should outspeed light, and, when she arrived in the garden it wouldn't be Charmion standing there but a cluster of swiftly converging, multicoloured lights. 

 

"Careful of the flowers," Didyme gasps, seizing Charmion by her upper arms and dropping her back on the cobblestones. "My late husband designed this garden,  you know, he didn't, like, live to see it finished but I made sure it was. All the flowers have special significance." 

 

"I wasn't told," Charmion says, dropping her eyes to the bouquet in hand. "Alas, the damage has already been done. What significance do these flowers hold?" 

 

A breeze picks up Charmion's caramel-coloured hair, the ribbons woven through it, the edges of her sleeves smeared with dirt. "I... Marcus never told me," Didyme replies. 

 

"Oh," Charmion says. She keeps her face downturned, but her eyes seem to burrow like bugs into DIdyme. 

 

"To be fair to him, I didn't really show an interest. I would've, you know, if I'd known..." 

 

"There's a striking water feature," Charmion says. "Choked up with pond moss, but I'm certain I can make it work again. I'm pretty good with my hands." She paused, her lips curling. "And I can replant the poppies. My late mistress was particularly fond of white poppies, I would crush the seeds for her draughts, which she took often, especially towards the end..." 

 

Charmion tilts her head. 

 

"You called me down?" 

 

"Of course," she says, shaking her head. "I wanted to thank you for the second chance. I also wanted to say, now we're friends, that you have the worst hair of anyone I've ever met." 

 

"You...called me down to say I have bad hair?"

 

"No, Didyme." Charmion presses her bouquet into Didyme's chest, and she takes it reflexively. Charmion picks up Didyme's hands and presses her thumbs into the middle of Didyme's palms. "Not bad. Not even awful. I cannot stress this enough, it's a hair atrocity. A hair-trocity. I demand persecution of the person that stitched it to your scalp. You have a hay bale on your head... no offence." 

 

Didyme lurches back, but Charmion's got a firm grip. She wants to throw her body in six different directions. "I don't care about my hair!" 

 

"That's obvious," Charmion intones. "But worry no more. Ever since I first saw you, blood still in my mouth, swinging off your brother's arm, I resolved to carry a comb and scissors around until I got this chance to talk to you. Of course, I had to wait until we were on good terms. I've carried them with me for months..." She pulls out a leather wallet and opens it, displaying a pair of heron-shaped copper scissors and a polished bone comb, glinting in the sun. 

 

"Wait, wait. We're barely on terms," Didyme says. "I wouldn't call them good ones." 

 

Charmion laughs and her throat bobs like she's taken a gulp of water, and the poppies, dandelions, marjoram and thistle grow bigger, brighter, and her prettiness slices through Didyme, opening in her a low, gurgling pain she hadn't realised she'd been carrying around, but she didn't want it to stop. Charmion directs Didyme to a garden seat and she spreads her cache of hairdressing tools across Didyme's lap. Charmion's hands circle around Didyme's throat, angling her head, and her hands are cool and not wringing or twisting or fleeting. 

 

"You've got so much tension in your shoulders!" Charmion says, and she laughs her plant-growing laugh, and the sound has an effect like a paint-stripper on Didyme. It isn't often she feels so naked, and she shudders like a dry strip of timber shaking free of its tree. Charmion puts her mouth to Didyme's ear and her breath is damp. "I'm a Saggitarius, by the way," she whispers conspiratorially. Didyme still doesn't know what she means, but she wishes she was the sort of person who does. 

 

She feels the cool metal slide through her hair, and Charmion's hand on her scalp, and the spring of a stitch coming apart. If this is what Charmion's gift feels like, Didyme made a grave misjudgement when they met. 

 

Didyme knocks back the afternoon like a glass of cool lemonade, feeling Charmion's lacework hands as they press against her for leverage or rest on her shoulders or lean over and brush hair back from Didyme's lips and eyes. Charmion is standing so close that Didyme can feel her stomach and the tops of her thighs press against her back. 

 

As Charmion liberates more of Didyme's hair, she starts to fidget. Her leg jumps restlessly. 

 

"What's the matter?" Chelsea says breezily. "Your hair is lovely, it's like black silk." Didyme feels her hand as it runs down her back. 

 

"It's not that. It's just... I hate it long. I hate the weight, the feeling of it on my shoulders, and it gets matted with blood or tangled on every little thing and I just can't be bothered with it. It's why we put it up in the first place." 

 

"Hmm." 

 

"I'm sorry," Didyme says, and her leg jumps faster. "I should've told you earlier, but..." Charmion's touch was so pleasing on her skin. 

 

"Mhmm, no, I'm thinking. Why don't I just cut it off?" 

 

"Cut it off? Like, above the shoulders?" 

 

"Cut it off," Charmion says, and the motes of amusement in her voice indicate she might laugh again. Didyme reckons a third laugh might just inflict a mortal wound. "It's fashionable for ladies to wear their hair short, at least it was in Egypt! I'm, as I said, good with my hands. I'm good at haircuts. When the war broke out, I gave all of Cleopatra's ladies' bobs." 

 

Didyme twists her hands like two snakes biting each other. After a few moments, the two snakes latch onto each knee. The afternoon is growing sickly with heat, but Charmion provides welcome shade. "Okay, then," Didyme says. "If that's the thing to do when there's war." 

 

* * *

 

 

"Very impressive, Charmion," Aro says, lazily leaning back in his chair and looking at the ceiling. The room is illuminated by a single rush candle, flickering wanly, only seeming to thicken and colour the shadows. 

 

But they were the sort of predators that lurk in the darkness. 

 

Charmion simpers and dips a little sycophantic curtsey. She feels herself puffing up under Aro's praise, but wooing his sister was but a trifle. Her skin seemed to rise up and meet all of Charmion's little touches, blooming like a mosquito swarm in scummy water.  

 

"Catching her when she was fresh with some little wound, and playing on her boredom, her loneliness, that's masterful." 

 

"Not exactly empire-building material, though." 

 

"You've proved your worth." 

 

Charmion dips her head again. Her dress is rank with dirt. The garden feeds on a steady supply of exsanguinated, composted corpses and Charmion imagines only a thin layer of earth covers their rot, the flowers turning faces towards the sun where corpses' faces sloughed away into the earth below. 

 

"I need to go to Alexandria for a few days," she says, wiping at the edge of her sleeve. "Caesarion's been dragged out of his bolthole, and he's slated for execution. I've gathered some flowers to put at the scaffold." 

 

"If that's what you want," Aro replies. He gives her a small, pursed smile. "But I warn you, from experience, that it's a mistake to meddle in your human past. It's best to treat your new life like a terra nullius. And we will use this land to build you into something spectacular." 

 

Charmion shrugs off his last comment. "I know. I laid my own grave." 

 

He's sitting bolt upright in his chair, and Charmion hadn't noticed the movement. His eyes are as wide as buckets and are sloshing with concern. He holds his body rigidly, attentively, a schoolroom posture. 

 

"Another warning, my dove; just as surely as I was seeking a replacement for my Marcus, so too is my sister." 

 

Charmion nods, but her hand in her pocket is curling a lock of lank black hair, not like silk at all, in tighter and tighter concentric circles, around her finger. 

 


End file.
